Hannes Wingate, The Burnside Nest

A bird about to be flipped.

Hannes Wingate’s The Burnside Nest, Portland’s newest public artwork,looks like a bird’s nest on steroids.

The
spherical sculpture is built to resemble an oversized bird’s nest. Way
oversized. So oversized, guests at the piece’s May 10 preview climbed
the 30-foot-tall tree it’s in to lounge and take in the view. It seats
five. (Sorry, the public isn’t allowed to climb into the nest, which is
on private property.) A stone’s throw from the Burnside Skatepark, it’s
just north of the east side of the Burnside Bridge at Northeast 3rd
Avenue, on the future site of the Burnside Bridgehead
business/residential development.

Wingate,
a Swedish artist who lives in Portland nine months of the year, built
the nest out of branches gathered from the site and from elsewhere in
town. He also incorporated human-made materials, just as birds do when
making nests. “Only humans consider nature as separate from themselves,”
the artist tells WW. “The bird does not. Therefore, it forages
for materials that are usable for the nest and doesn’t care if they’re
‘natural’ or not, as long as they work.” Ergo, woven into the nest are a
box spring, a street sign, part of a chair, some rebar and
two-by-fours. The piece recalls sculptures by noted British artist Andy
Goldsworthy, who uses natural materials in his site-specific “Land Art”
installations.

The
day Wingate started constructing the nest, he was stopped four times by
the Portland police, even though he’d secured a land-use permit from the
Portland Development Commission. The skaters nearby were skeptical,
too, although Wingate says he’s since won them over. It’s easy to see
why—The Burnside Nest is damned cute. It’s a nest, for crying out
loud, primal symbol of home and nurturing. And although nobody is
likely to mistake it for a High Modernist masterpiece by Constantin
Brâncusi or Henry Moore, the sculpture has a crunchy, eco-friendly
coziness that could bring out the kid in even the most jaded curmudgeon.
It’s a shame it will have to be taken down at the end of July to make
way for Burnside Bridgehead, but Wingate has talked with developer Jeff
Pickhardt and Jeff Kovel of Skylab Architecture about possibly returning
the nest to the site once the building is completed.